Team

Sabine Niederer, Andrei Mogoutov, Bram Nijhof.

Introduction - Climate Change Skeptics Hold a Conference

In March 2008, the Heartland Institute organized the first Climate Change skeptics conference, "the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change." It was organized in a traditional scientific format with keynote speakers and 3 days of parallel tracks with panels. There are also proceedings in the form of audio and video clips. In his opening remarks, the organizer, Joseph L. Bast, states: "These scientists and economists have been published thousands of times in the worlds leading scientific journals and have written hundreds of books. If you call this the fringe, wheres the center?" (http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/newyork08.cfm)

This project is an inquiry into the place and status of climate change skepticism. First, we would like to gain a sense of the composition of climate change skepticism by comparing the skeptics' disciplines with those of climate science. Do the skeptics have a similar distribution of disciplines as the non-skeptics?

Secondly, we are interested in how 'mainstream' or 'fringe' the skeptics are. Are they published in journals that are significant in climate science more broadly? What is the status of the publications and journals within climate science? Here a comparison of three types of journals is of interest: those publishing no skeptics, those publishing only skeptics and those publishing both. Are the journals that publish both the skeptics and the non-skeptics amongst the journals with the greatest impact in the climate-related fields? Are the journals that publish only the skeptics among the most significant journals?

Finally, we ask would like to inquire into the specificity of the expertise of the skeptics. Are they working exclusively or mainly in the area of climate change? Or, do they also work in other areas? In particular, we are interested in whether the skeptics have other issues they are skeptical about.

Lists of Climate Change Skeptics

There are a series of lists available with climate change skeptics, including wikipedia entries, compiliations by watchdogs as well as outcomes from more academic analysis. For the purposes of analysis we have compiled a short list as well as a long list of climate change skeptics. The short list is derived from a triangulation of sources (below) as well as the keynote speakers at the skeptics' conference, "the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change," organized by the Heartland Institute in March 2008. (Frederick Seitz passed away prior to the conference, yet has been kept on the list.)

The top 5 disciplines in the climate sciences are among the top 10 disciplines in the skeptics' sciences.

Question 2: How 'mainstream' or 'fringe' are climate change skeptics within the fields of climate science?

Do the skeptics publish significant articles (heavily cited by others in the fields of climate science)? Do they publish in significant journals, according to those journals receiving the most citations for climate change related articles?

Are the journals that publish no skeptics more significant than those that publish only skeptics?

Here we query ISI's Web of Science for all articles on "climate change." On 9 July 2008 there are approximately 27,000 articles, 15,877 of which receive at least three citations. That set of almost 16,000 articles is retained for the analysis.

The skeptics and the non-skeptics publish in the same top four climate change-related journals.

climate_change_journals_all.png:

Question 3: Are the climate change skeptics devoted mainly to climate change, or do they also have other issues (which they may be skeptical about as well)?

The question concerns the specificity of the skeptics to the issue of climate change. Are the skeptics primarily in the area of climate change, or do they have other issues (which they also may be skeptical about)?

In order to find the climate change skeptics' other issues, perform qualitative analysis of the climate change skeptics' homepages as well as pages about the skeptics (e.g., from Wikipedia, Sourcewatch as well as the DeSmogBlog).

method

Query ISI Web of Science for the skeptics' articles and download the articles' data.